by Lisa Rochon
She held still, not wanting to interrupt. The model was roughly hewn, with ragged, muddy edges, so unlike the polished marble statue of the Virgin Mary looking down at her with sad, perfect eyes inside her little village church. This model seemed to be testing the limits of balance. How much weight the right foot could take. She lifted her eyes from the model’s legs to the genitals. It seemed Michelangelo was also testing how much masculinity to sculpt. He wasn’t holding back, she thought, stepping forward to have a better look. “Dio mio,” she whispered.
Michelangelo turned, rubbing his face as if he had been roused from a deep sleep. “You, there,” he said, looking at her. His mouth shifted into a tense smile, and she noticed the way his eyes darkened at the same time. He was likely upset by her unexpected arrival, the interruption of his work. He crossed his arms and motioned with his head. “This is called a bozzetto,” he informed her.
Encouraged by his voice, she nodded and stepped closer. “Is this the beginning or the end? I mean, is somebody paying you to make this?” The torrent of questions spilled from her mouth as she gestured with the olive oil bottle to emphasize each one. “It looks rough. Do you want it to look rough, or will you be polishing it? And he is little, so little compared to that other David. I think it used to be over at the Palazzo Medici. It stood for a while in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Do you know the one I’m talking about? It is brown, and David stands on the head of Goliath.”
She stopped talking and waited. He seemed slightly amused and taken aback by her unbridled tongue. “Yes, I know it. That’s the David by Donatello. He cast it in bronze; that’s why it looks brown.”
“Well, he looks like a girl and he slays a giant. That’s one of the reasons I like it.”
“I like it because he stands without any support. No trees or columns to lean against. A first since antiquity.”
“He or she,” said Beatrice.
“True enough,” he said, cocking his head to the side, considering. “I like the way you think.” He took the olive oil from her and placed the carafe on the long studio table. “Thanks for coming back, especially after the last time, with Agnella.” He looked again at Beatrice and may have seen the concern on her face. “Don’t worry, I’m not using a live model these days.”
Beatrice stole another look at the bozzetto’s hair matted between the legs. Those tiny curls—was that what Michelangelo looked like below his own intimate wraps? She felt a rush of feelings that revolted and amazed her.
“This little man will be my teacher,” he said. “I’m testing my ideas on this bozzetto before starting the sculpture.”
As he spoke, his mouth relaxed. He glanced at her again. Maybe he didn’t mind her visit, she thought.
“Is somebody paying you for this little man?”
“The Wool Guild. They asked me to make a giant David for the Duomo.”
“I bet they’re paying you in gold florins.” She felt happy, truly happy for him, and yet demolished by her loneliness, her insignificance, the fact that she was paid in coppers, never gold.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. “No fennel soup today!” she said, changing the subject. “I mean, I was sorry we just barged in on you that time. Agnella knows how to kick down doors with her boots.” She stood looking at her naked feet, regretting her words. “I hope you like the olive oil, though, from my—our—village.”
“You and Agnella are neighbors,” he said, over his shoulder, as he stepped back to the bozzetto, hands pressing against the clay. “She looked after me when I was a boy.”
Beatrice had heard this. “Was your father at war?” she asked; she had wondered if this “Florentine” was truly from outside the walls.
“My father has always been at war with me. From the time I could draw,” he said. “He thought art was a low thing. That sculpting was the same as being a stonecutter.” She saw him narrow his eyes, wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Lower class. Beneath the name of our old, noble family. He put me in grammar school and I ran away. I took a lot of beatings for that.”
She wondered if she should confess her own attempts at making art: her pathetic stick drawings in the dirt, her primitive charcoal drawings on the city’s walls, for which she was paid nothing. Standing in his studio, inhaling the wet, loamy smell of mud, she hardly felt worthy as an artist. “Is this bozzetto, as you call it, like a sketch before doing the real painting?”
“Exactly right.” He seemed content to have her next to him while he worked at shaping the clay. She waited and observed, mesmerized, keeping her words inside her mouth.
“Have you ever sculpted anything?” Michelangelo turned and looked at her.
“Just headdresses made of leaves and grapevines.”
“I was thirteen years old when I started my apprenticeship with the artist Ghirlandaio. We spent our days practicing how to draw. We drew with silverpoint or conté, sometimes on white sheets, sometimes on colored paper. We made our own paints with natural pigments—yellow ocher or indigo—mixed into crushed animal bones. We would copy drawings by the masters and learn how to draw space and buildings with perspective, how to draw the body with anatomically correct knowledge. After one year I was accepted into the Medici Free Art School.”
She was listening carefully to what he was saying while also studying the muscles in his arms, the smoothness of his chest.
“Here,” he said, picking up a mound of clay and shaping it into a ball. “Make something out of this—whatever you like.”
Beatrice screwed up her face and went silent. Michelangelo recounted his story of apprenticeship as if it were as easy as fishing in the Arno. But she knew better. To be picked as a protégé of the Medici was a rare honor. There were hundreds of artists whose studios she passed during her olive oil runs, and they were typically dark bottegas, hardly grand villas surrounded by vast gardens.
“I wouldn’t know how,” she said.
“Pick something, anything at all.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Forgive me if I have been too forward,” he offered. “I usually don’t talk so much. I usually ban my friends when I’m working.” He looked over at her kindly. “Trust yourself. Give it a try.”
Tentatively, she touched her hands to the ball and was instantly repulsed by the cool, wet texture. “I’d rather draw,” she blurted out, confessing, “Sometimes I do drawings on walls.”
“That’s good, really good. Look, I’m working on one over here.” He walked to the plaster wall of his studio and picked up a stick of charcoal.
“A putto,” she said, following him and seeing a half-dressed cherub on the wall.
“Unfinished, though. I need to deepen the folds of the drapery.”
“Or something else. Something beside it?”
“What are you thinking?”
She looked at the ground and said nothing.
“I was raised by a stonecutter and his healer wife. I’m most comfortable with simple people, the popolo minuto, telling stories around the hearth. It’s rare that I trust anybody else.”
His encouragement was difficult to resist. She thought back to the time he left her sitting on the sacks of grain after lifting her dead father into the cart for burial. When he had offered to stay and help her, when she had wondered if he could be trusted.
“You should try putting a bird on the wall. I like to draw them, and cherubs, or angels looking wrecked and sad. Maybe a goldfinch?” There. Done. She had dared to speak it.
He pushed aside some of his hair—curly, unbrushed, fallen over his eyes—and looked at her sideways. “A goldfinch . . .” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Not a tame, unmoving thing like artists around here do. Something with some life. Wings out, about to fly. The way Leonardo likes to see them.”
“Leonardo? Da Vinci?” Michelangelo looked directly at Beatrice. Now she had his attention. “You know him?”
“He sets birds free. I saw him release a big white one in the
line outside the city gates. We were both trying to get in.” The words tumbled out of her, and her eyes grew wide with the telling. “He buys birds and releases them so he can watch them fly and escape into the sky.”
Michelangelo smiled, and she watched him as his eyes flitted from her face to the timber ceiling to the dirt floor. His brain was working, she could see that. The way his mouth was tensing again into a straight line, it was as if he were talking to somebody in his head. Not her. Maybe God.
“Why don’t you draw the bird yourself?” He held out the charcoal.
“Me? I’m no artist!” She laughed one of her shrill hyena laughs, the way she did when she was nervous—or lying, as her mother used to tell her.
He held the charcoal and waited. She noticed that the tips of his fingers were cracked and bleeding. “What happened to you?”
As if noticing for the first time, he dabbed his hands with a patch of linen, staining it with pinpricks of red. “It’s nothing. There’s so much moisture in the clay. It cracks open the skin of my fingertips.”
She took a breath in and exhaled long and slow. Reluctantly, she took the charcoal from him and bent slowly toward the wall. A few deft lines and she had defined the delicate head and the body of the goldfinch. She backed away from the wall, considered her drawing and bent in again. This time, she loosened her grip to express something quick, like movement. “I want the wings to beat fast.”
He reached over and touched her hand. “More here,” he said, guiding her fingers to crosshatch the lower section of the wings.
She moved toward the wall and deepened the curve of the wings. She liked the feeling of his rough, hard hand on hers. There was nothing lecherous about it, not like the groping fingers of other artists in the laneway. The tenderness of Michelangelo’s touch came as a surprise, and the moment she felt it she wanted more of it, more of his sweaty, wet clay smell. Clearing her throat, coming back to her senses, she stood back, amazed that by darkening she had also freed space for more light on the wing tips. The bird looked like it was moving fast toward the open sky.
“There,” said Michelangelo, nodding at her work appreciatively. “I like it. Feels primitive, very direct, almost Etruscan.”
Beatrice looked over at him. She liked the way his low brow pressed toward his crooked nose when he spoke. Was it possible to love somebody for a misshapen nose? “Grazie,” she said, looking at him and the table with his drawing tools.
“You will visit me again, bring me more olive oil?” His voice was serious and raspy, as if veiled in stone dust. “Are you safe?” he asked. “Do you feel you’re safe living in Settignano? The Pisans are warriors. As you know.”
“Yes, I am fine. It’s not just me. I have a family of birds.” The words were gushing out of her mouth again. “We sleep together at night. My constant companion is the sun. And the moon when I walk down the hill to Florence before dawn.” She spoke of her life as if it was pure bliss.
“Birds?” he asked, without moving his eyes from his drawing on the wall.
“A rooster and a hen and baby chicks. The rooster is called The Pope. We all get along. And the city isn’t far.”
“It’s two hours by foot,” he said, smiling gently at her.
“Sometimes Agnella picks me up in her cart and that saves my feet from the walk. Mostly I . . .” She stopped talking and peered closely at her drawing of the goldfinch on the plaster. It really did look like it was beating its wings fast.
“Keep working on your art,” said Michelangelo, scrutinizing their wall paintings. “Remember, you’re an artist, too.”
“I’m not like you,” she muttered.
“Why is that?”
“I’m just an olive oil girl.”
“Maybe.” He flicked his eyes to the roof timbers and down to the goldfinch. “But look at what you’ve drawn right now on the wall. Not just a bird, but something else.” He shifted on his feet and found the words: “A feeling called freedom.”
“I like that. When I am walking, I will think of your words,” she said. “For I hate climbing that hill home.”
Chapter 13
Michelangelo had gone to the other side of the river to perform a human dissection on an old cleric named Antonio. He had worked all night in a private room within the Santo Spirito monastery. It was a privilege to learn about human anatomy, but every time he cut into a dead man a feeling of dread came over him, as if he was trading his humanity for knowledge. After dissecting, he would retreat to the church—a masterwork of symmetry and serenity by Brunelleschi. This morning, exhausted from his night’s work, he lay down on a wooden bench and was about to fall asleep when the prior of Santo Spirito interrupted him.
“That dead man,” said the prior, shoving Michelangelo aside so he could set his own sprawling body down. Prior Bichiellini maintained strict discipline among the Augustinian order, but was himself fat, rude and wickedly intelligent. “Tell me, did you have to pull his head out of his ass?”
He was ten years older than Michelangelo, but they were comrades whose bond had been forged from a secret: Prior Bichiellini provided him with the cadavers.
Officially, the church outlawed dissection and warned that anybody who abused a dead body was committing a mortal sin, punishable by death. The prior felt, in this case, that the pursuit of knowledge outweighed the decrees of the pope. Michelangelo was an exceptional artist—he had earned that reputation by carving the Pietà for Saint Peter’s church in Rome—and Bichiellini believed his decision to grant dissection rights to the young man was warranted. There would always be grandiose dictates from the Vatican. Most high-placed cardinals were careerists in search of worldly gain, not enlightenment. Perhaps they might learn from some of Michelangelo’s investigations into how muscles were woven throughout the body or, his most recent interest, whether the brain was more powerful than previously thought.
Michelangelo rubbed a hand over his eyes.
“A delicate man,” added the prior, gazing at the east clerestory of windows. “Antonio preferred undergarments in the finest silk. Couldn’t stand rough linen. But a dandy in bed, if you could persuade him.”
“His brain showed various shades.” The dissection had been long and difficult—extracting the jelly from the vessels and pulling the sections apart. “Light gray at the front lobe, and darker purple matter toward the back.” Michelangelo had suspected the brain was divided into lightness and darkness, but it took him more than two hours to remove the sticky layer of blood so that he could see for himself. Then it was as obvious as the white and dark meat of a turkey. “People don’t place value on the brain, compared to the heart. A year ago, I wondered that a brain could have such complex—”
“Inner reflection, dreams, motives?” suggested the prior.
“Ambitions, animal desires, poetry and evil. Why shouldn’t the brain consist of more than one shade?” He looked down at his hands, his nails rimmed with blood.
The prior folded his arms over his rotund middle and nodded, considering Michelangelo’s words. “Shall we?” he said.
The men rose, walked to the western corner of the church. They made this pilgrimage often, for the pleasure of staring at the cross hanging in the octagonal sacristy. Michelangelo had carved it from limewood when he was eighteen years old.
His Christ depicted more of a boy than a man. The mouth full and sensual, the calves softly defined, as befit a carpenter’s apprentice; his arms, stretched wide, were lithe and innocent, as if only days before they had embraced his mother and father at sunrise. After cutting himself on a thornbush, Michelangelo had painted a path of blood from Christ’s ribs all the way down to the right hip; the loins he covered discreetly with a cloth made from wood and plaster. He’d fashioned Jesus’ hair from human hair braided into sheep wool. A few novices at the monastery had donated their locks after having their heads tonsured. Michelangelo had tried to carve a life that had been robbed. Once there was a man, and he was a carpenter, and he was good and decent, but none
of that mattered compared to the need to satisfy the aspirations of others. The crucifixion was the only one of his works he could stand to view over and over.
“This interest in distinguishing light from dark in the brain,” said the prior. “It goes well beyond Leonardo’s notes on the skull. You recall his observations?”
“Of course.”
“He was obsessed with proportions. About the cavity of the eye socket and the cavity in the bone that supports the cheeks; that the nose and mouth were of equal depth.” The library at Santo Spirito was among the most sophisticated in the land, and the prior had arranged for some of Leonardo’s works to be copied.
“And each is as deep as the third part of a man’s face, from the eyebrows to the hairline,” recited Michelangelo.
“So you have memorized his anatomical studies?”
“At the Palazzo Medici—like everybody else,” came the curt reply.
Michelangelo owed a huge debt to Lorenzo de’ Medici for choosing him, an awkward, obsessive boy, and taking him into his palatial home; his shyness could sometimes be confused for belligerence. The manicured gardens of the Medici palace, the orange and lemon trees framing naked figures sculpted during antiquity, had made a profound impression on him. Lorenzo had once lovingly placed a rose-colored velvet mantle around his shoulders. And then the Medici family was run out of town. Was that nearly ten years ago?
“What everyone hasn’t noticed is that there’s a problem with his notes,” Michelangelo said. “His treatise on dissection was limited to aesthetics. The old man’s attempt at solving the ideal proportions of man was simple-minded—”
“Simple-minded? You miserable piece of shit,” roared the prior, in mock despair. “Leonardo da Vinci is a genius.”
“I merely speak the truth.”
“That old man was the first to explain the workings of the womb and conception. And there was nothing simple in his explanation of the physical properties of joy, sadness, labor . . .” He tapped his forehead. “Forgive me, I’m forgetting one of them.”
